The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw potx

The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw Burroughs, Edgar Rice Published: 1937 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories Source: http://gutenberg.net.au 1 About Burroughs: Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan, although he also produced works in many genres. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Burroughs: • Tarzan of the Apes (1912) • A Princess of Mars (1912) • John Carter and the Giant of Mars (1940) • The Gods of Mars (1918) • A Fighting Man of Mars (1930) • The Master Mind of Mars (1927) • Swords of Mars (1934) • The Warlord of Mars (1918) • The Chessmen of Mars (1922) • Thuvia Maid of Mars (1920) Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50. Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes. 2 Chapter 1 Credit story to Wild Pat Morgan, that laughing, reckless, black-haired grandson of Ireland's peat bogs. To Pat Morgan, one-time flying lieuten- ant of the AEF, ex-inventor, amateur boxer, and drinking companion par excellence. I met Pat Morgan at the country club bar, one of those casual things. After the third highball we were calling each other by our first names. By the sixth we had dragged the family skeletons out of the closet and were shaking the dust off them. A little later we were weeping on one another's shoulders, and that's how it began. We got pretty well acquainted that evening, and afterwards our friendship grew. We saw a lot of each other when he brought his ship to the airport where I kept mine. His wife was dead, and he was a rather lonely figure evenings; so I used to have him up to the house for dinner often. He had been rather young when the war broke out, but had managed to get to France and the front just before the end. I think he shot down three enemy planes, although he was just a kid. I had that from another flyer; Pat never talked about it. But he was full of flying anecdotes about other war-time pilots and about his own stunting experiences in the movies. He had followed this latter profession for several years. All of which has nothing to do with the real story other than to explain how I became well enough acquainted with Pat Morgan to be on hand when he told the strange tale of his flight to Russia, of the scientist who mastered Time, of the man from 50,000 B.C. called Jimber-Jaw. We were lunching together at The Vendome that day. I had been wait- ing for Pat at the bar, discussing with some others the disappearance of Stone, the wrestler. Everyone is familiar, of course, with Stone's meteoric rise to fame as an athlete and a high-salaried star in the movies, and his vanishing had become a minor ten-days' wonder. We were trying to de- cide if Stone had been kidnapped, whether the ransom letters received were the work of cranks, when Pat Morgan came in with the extra 3 edition of the Herald and Express that the newsboys were hawking in the streets. I followed Pat to our table and he spread the paper out. A glaring headline gave the meat of the story. "So they've found him!" I exclaimed. Pat Morgan nodded. "The police had me in on it. I've just come from Headquarters." He shrugged, frowned, and then began to talk slowly: 4 Chapter 2 I've always been inclined to putter around with inventions (Pat Morgan said), and after my wife died I tried to forget my loneliness by centering my interest on my laboratory work. It was a poor substitute for the com- panionship I had lost, but at that I guess it proved my salvation. I was working on a new fuel which was much cheaper and less bulky than gasoline; but I found that it required radical changes in engine design, and I lacked the capital to put my blueprints into metal. About this time my grandfather died and left me a considerable for- tune. Quite a slice of it went into experimental engines before I finally perfected one. It was a honey. I built a ship and installed my engine in it; then I tried to sell the pat- ents on both engine and fuel to the Government—but something happened. When I reached a certain point in these official negotiations I ran into an invisible stone wall—I was stopped dead. I couldn't even get a permit to manufacture my engine. I never did find out who or what stopped me, but I remembered the case of the Doble steam car. Perhaps you will recall that, also. Then I got sore and commenced to play around with the Russians. The war-winds were already beginning to blow again in Europe, and the comrades of the Soviet were decidedly interested in new aircraft devel- opments. They had money to burn, and their representatives had a way with them that soothed the injured ego of a despondent inventor. They finally made me a splendid offer to take my plans and formulae to Mo- scow and manufacture engines and fuel for them. In addition, as a publi- city and propaganda stunt, they offered a whacking bonus if I would put my new developments to the test by flying there. I jumped at this chance to make monkeys out of those bureaucratic boneheads in Washington. I'd show those guys what they were missing. During the course of these negotiations I met Dr. Stade who was also flirting with the brethren of the U.S.S.R. Professor Marvin Stade, to give him his full name and title, and he was quite a guy. A big fellow, built like an ox, with a choleric temper and the most biting pair of blue eyes 5 I've ever gazed upon. You must have read in the papers about Stade's ex- periments with frozen dogs and monkeys. He used to freeze them up solid for days and weeks, and then thaw them out and bring them alive again. He had also been conducting some unique studies in surgical hyp- nosis, and otherwise stepping on the toes of the constituted medical poobahs. The S.P.C.A. and the Department of Health had thrown a monkey- wrench into Stade's program-stopped him cold—and there was fire in his eye. We were a couple of soreheads, perhaps, but I think we had a right to be. Lord knows we were both sincere in what we were trying to accomplish—he to fight disease, I to add something to the progress of aviation. The Reds welcomed Dr. Stade with open arms. They agreed not only to let him carry his experiments as far as he liked but to finance him as well. They even promised to let him use human beings as subjects and to furnish said humans in job lots. I suppose they had a large supply of counter-revolutionists on hand. When Stade found that I planned to fly my ship to Moscow, he asked if he might go along. He was a showman as well as a scientist, and the publicity appealed to him. I told him the risk was too great, that I didn't want to take the responsibility of any life other than my own, but he pooh-poohed every objection in that bull-bellow voice of his. Finally I shrugged and said okay. I won't bore you with the details of the flight. You couldn't have read about it in the papers, of course, for the word went out through official channels that we were to get a cold shoulder. The press put a blanket of silence on us, and that was that. There were passport difficulties, refusals to certify the plane, all that sort of thing. But we managed to muddle through. The engine functioned perfectly. So did the fuel. So did everything, in- cluding my navigation, until we were flying over the most God-forsaken terrain anyone ever saw—some place in Northern Siberia according to our maps. That's where my new-fangled carburetor chose to go haywire. We had about ten thousand feet elevation at the time, but that wasn't much help. There was no place to land. As far as I could see there was nothing but forests and rivers—hundreds of rivers. I went into a straight glide with a tail-wind, figuring I could cover a lot more territory that way than I could by spiralling; and every second I was keeping my eyes peeled for a spot, however small, where I might set 6 her down without damage. We'd never get out of that endless forest, I knew, unless we flew out. I've always liked trees—a nature-lover at heart—but as I looked down on that vast host of silent sentinels of the wilderness, I felt the chill of fear and something that was akin to hate. There was a loneliness and an emptiness inside me. There they stood—in regiments, in divisions, in armies, waiting to seize us and hold us forever; to hold our broken bod- ies, for when we struck them, they would crush us, tear us to pieces. Then I saw a little patch of yellow far ahead. It was no larger than the palm of my hand, it seemed, but it was an open space—a tiny sanctuary in the very heart of the enemy's vast encampment. As we approached, it grew larger until at last it resolved itself into a few acres of reddish yel- low soil devoid of trees. It was the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. As the ship rolled to a stop on fairly level ground, I turned and looked at Dr. Stade. He was lighting a cigarette. He paused, with the match still burning, and grinned at me. I knew then that he was regular. It's funny, but neither one of us had spoken since the motor quit. That was as it should have been; for there was nothing to say—at least nothing that would have meant anything. We got down and looked around. Beside us, a little river ran north to empty finally into the Arctic Ocean. Our tiny patch of salvation lay in a bend on the west side of the river. On the east side was a steep cliff that rose at least three hundred feet above the river. The lowest stratum looked like dirty glass. Above that were strata of conglomerate and sedi- mentary rock; and, topping all, the grim forest scowled down upon us menacingly. "Funny looking rock," I commented, pointing toward the lowest ledge. "Ice," said Stade. "My friend, you are looking at the remnants of the late lamented glacial period that raised havoc with the passing of the Pleistocene. What are we going to use for food?" "We got guns," I reminded him. "Yes. It was very thoughtful of you to get permission to bring firearms and ammunition, but what are we going to shoot?" I shrugged. "There must be something. What are all these trees for? They must have been put here for birds to sit on. In the meantime we've sandwiches and a couple of thermoses of hot coffee. I hope it's hot." "So do I." It wasn't… . 7 I took a shotgun and hunted up river. I got a hare—mostly fur and bones—and a brace of birds that resembled partridges. By the time I got back to camp the weather had become threatening. There was a storm north of us. We could see the lightning, and faint thunder began to growl. We had already wheeled the plane to the west and highest part of our clearing and staked it down as close under the shelter of the forest as we could. Nothing else to do. By the time we had cooked and eaten our supper it commenced to rain. The long, northern twilight was obliterated by angry clouds that rolled low out of the north. Thunder bombarded us. Lightning laid down a barrage of pale brilliance all about. We crawled into the cabin of the plane and spread our mattresses and blankets on the floor behind the seats. It rained. And when I say it rained, I mean it rained. It could have giv- en ancient Armenia seven-and-a-half honor tricks and set it at least three; for what it took forty days and forty nights to do in ancient Armenia, it did in one night on that nameless river somewhere in Siberia, U.S.S.R. I'll never forget that downpour. I don't know how long I slept, but when I awoke it was raining not cats and dogs only, but the entire animal kingdom. I crawled out and looked through a window. The next flash of lightning showed the river swirling within a few feet of the outer wing. I shook Dr. Stade awake and called his attention to the danger of our situation. "The devil!" he said. "Wait till she floats." He turned over and went to sleep again. Of course it wasn't his ship, and perhaps he was a strong swimmer; I wasn't. I lay awake most of what was left of the night. The rising flood was a foot deep around the landing gear at the worst; then she commenced to go down. The next morning the river was running in a new channel a few yards from the ship, and the cliff had receded at least fifty feet toward the east. The face of it had fallen into the river and been washed away. The lowest stratum was pure and gleaming ice. I called Stade's attention to the topographical changes. "That's interesting," he said. "By any chance is there any partridge or hare left?" 8 There was, and we ate it. Then we got out and sloshed around in the mud. I started to work on the carburetor. Stade studied the havoc wrought by the storm. He was down by the edge of the river looking at the new cliff face when he called to me excitedly. I had never before seen the burly pro- fessor exhibit any enthusiasm except when he was damning the S.P.C.A. and the health authorities. I went on the run. I could see nothing to get excited about. "What's eating you?" I asked. "Come here, you dumb Irishman, and see a man fifty thousand years old, or thereabouts." Stade was mainly Scotch and German, which may have accounted for his crazy sense of humor. I was worried. I thought maybe it might be the heat, but there wasn't any heat. No more could it have been the altitude; so I figured it must be hereditary, and crawled down and walked over to him. "Look!" he said. He pointed across the river at the cliff. I looked—and there it was. Frozen into the solid ice, was the body of a man. He was clothed in furs and had a mighty beard. He lay on his side with his head resting on one arm, as though he were soundly sleeping. Stade was awe struck. He just stood there, goggle-eyed, staring at the corpse. Finally he drew in his breath in a long sigh. "Do you realize, Pat, that we are looking at a man who may have lived fifty thousand years ago, a survivor of the old Stone Age?" "What a break for you, Doc," I said. "Break for me? What do you mean?" "You can thaw him out and bring him to life." He looked at me in a sort of blank way, as though he didn't compre- hend what I was saying. His lips moved, mumbling, then he shook his head. "I'm afraid he's been frozen too long," he said. "Fifty thousand years is quite a while, but wouldn't it be worth trying? Keep you busy while I'm fixing things to get us out of here." Again he fixed his blank stare upon me. His eyes were cold and ex- pressionless as that distant cliff of ice. "All right, Paddy me boy," he said suddenly. "But you'll have to help me." 9 Chapter 3 My suggestion was a joke, of course, but Stade was in deadly earnest once he got started. I wasn't much help, I'm afraid, after the first couple of days, for I came down with a queer combination of chills and fever that had me light-headed most of the time. But I worked when I could. It took us two weeks to build a rude hut of saplings and chink it with clay. It had a fireplace and a bench for the queer paraphernalia that Stade had brought along—more gadgets than you could shake a stick at. Then it took us another two weeks to chip our cave man out of the ice. We had to be careful; there was danger of breaking him. I'm the one who gave our corpse his name. There in the ice, with his skin-clad body and his hairy face, he looked like a big lantern-jawed grizzly I'd seen one time up the Yellowstone. Jimber-Jaw had been the grizzly's name, and that's what I called our discovery. That fever had me so dizzy, I tell you, that I felt like a man on a spree most of the time. Anyway, we worked all around our frozen subject, leaving him en- cased in a small block of the glacier. Then we lowered him to the ground, floated him across the river, and dragged him up to the laboratory on a crude sled we had built for that purpose. All the time we were working on him we did a lot of thinking. I kept on treating the whole thing as a sort of joke, but Stade grew more grimly serious with every day. He worked with a furious driving energy that swept me along. Nights, by the fire, he would talk on and on about the memories that were locked in that frozen brain. What sights had those ice-cased eyes beheld in the days when the world was young? What loves, what hates had stirred that mighty breast? Here was a creature that had lived in the days of the mammoth and the sabre-tooth and the great flying monsters. He had survived against the odds, with only a stone spear and a stone knife against a predatory world, until the cold of the great glacier had captured and overpowered him. Stade said he had been hunting and that he had been caught in a bliz- zard. Numb with cold, he had at last dropped down on the chill ice, 10 [...]... hombre He knows all the dirty tricks that the other wrestlers know and has invented quite a few of his own But he didn't have an opportunity to try any of them on Jim The moment they met in the center of the ring, the man who lived in the day of the mammoths, picked him up, carried him to the ropes, and threw him into the fourth row He did that three times, and the last time Tiny stayed there You couldn't... country?" he asked "They are no different from men The men smoke; the women smoke The men drink; the women drink The men swear; the women swear They gamble—they tell dirty stories—they are out all night and cannot be fit to look after the caves and the children the next day They are only good for one thing, otherwise they might as well be men One does not need to take a mate for what they can give—not... about him The first time he went to the Trocadero he turned to me and asked, "What kind of women are these?" I told him that, measured by fame and wealth, they were the cream of the elect "They are without shame," he said "They go almost naked before men In my country their men would drag them home by the hair and beat them." I had to admit that that was what some of our men would like to do "Of what... dumb Kulak, put the evil eye on him, drugged him up—yes, it could have happened that way But I don't believe it." He tapped the newspaper that told in screaming headlines of the discovery of the body of Jim Stone The story told of Stone's quick rise to fame, of his disappearance, of the finding of him that morning, an apparent suicide "But the whole story isn't there," Pat Morgan said "The police called... rejoined the man from the old Stone Age "Bring 'em on!" They shook hands and retired to their corners; then the bell rang The white hope came charging out like the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and he got just about as far Big Jim swung one terrific right that he must have learned from the cave-bear and the white hope was draped over the upper rope That was the end of that fight Others went similar ways: then... warriors?" he inquired Then, before I could do anything about it, he vaulted over the ropes and threw them both into the third row The Lone Wolf and Tiny Sawbuck were sore, but the audience and the promoter were one hundred percent plus for Jimber-Jaw Before the evening was over, the latter had signed Jim up to meet the winner, and a week later our survivor of the Stone Age stepped into the ring with Tiny... dead I shall find her." 15 Chapter 4 The plane was so absolutely beyond Jimber-Jaw' s conception that he couldn't even ask questions about it I think anyone else in the world, under similar circumstances, would have been terrified when we finally took off from that lonely Siberian forest The whir of the propeller, the roar of the exhaust, the wild careening of the take-off must have had some effect on Jim,... moment's hesitation he tried to follow her 18 It wasn't so much the damage he did to the screen as the hurt to the theater manager's pride He made the mistake of trying to eject Jim by force That was a mistake After they had gathered the manager up from the sidewalk and carried him to his office, I managed to settle with him and keep Jim out of jail When we got home, I asked Jim what it was all about "It... distinctly and other parts that are only a hazy blank Stade built a roaring blaze in the fireplace and our laboratory-hut was oven warm The propeller of the plane, idling, kept the air of the room in circulation, blowing wind through an opening in the wall that had been built for that purpose I helped to prop our subject in front of the fire, then slumped back, all groggy, and left the rest to Stade... turning Jimber-Jaw over—first one side then the other toward the fire—until the ice was all melted Then the body commenced to warm I stopped my singing long enough to get sensible I shook the fog out of my brain and stared at Stade I knew perfectly well that the best we could expect was that in due course our prehistoric statue would turn blue and commence to smell, but for some reason I couldn't fight off . we finally took off from that lonely Siberian forest. The whir of the propeller, the roar of the exhaust, the wild careening of the take-off must have had some. of what was left of the night. The rising flood was a foot deep around the landing gear at the worst; then she commenced to go down. The next morning the